Outseta v2 vs. Outseta v3

Today we released a new version of Outseta. Any new customer signing for Outseta as of this morning will be signing up for Outseta v3 whereas our existing customers are currently using Outseta v2. If you're unsure, look in the top right hand corner of your Outseta account and you'll now find a version number.

While all of the product updates we’ve made over the last 10 years have been changes that we could automatically publish to our customers’ Outseta accounts, that’s not the case with this one. This new version of Outseta is rebuilt on different billing architecture—it represents an entirely new product rather than a change we can simply push to your existing Outseta account.

The objective of this post is to outline the differences between Outseta v2 and Outseta v3, so our existing customers understand the differences between the two products and can make an educated decision about whether they want to migrate their business to the new product.

Let me say clearly up front:

You don’t need to do anything—you can continue to use Outseta just as you are today.

The changes are almost entirely focused on billing and payments. Whichever version of the product you use, you’ll continue to get all updates to our other features (auth, protected content, CRM, email, help desk, etc.)

We recognize that our customers often have different levels of familiarity with Stripe and payment processing tools more broadly. This post starts with an overview of the major difference between the products, then transitions into the technical specifics for those who want them.

Let’s get into it.

We’ve rebuilt Outseta around “Stripe Billing”

Outseta v3 is an entirely rebuilt version of Outseta that uses Stripe Billing as the underlying billing engine. Many of you are probably wondering “Hasn’t Outseta always used Stripe?” 

Yes—so here’s the distinction.

Outseta v2 has always used Stripe as a payment gateway—this means that Stripe is essentially the plumbing through which payments get processed. But all of the code around subscription management and setting up “plans” and “add-ons” in Outseta was something that our team built and maintained. Plans and add-ons were created in Outseta and we then processed a payment in the appropriate amount through Stripe.

With Outseta v3 we’re still using Stripe as a payment gateway, but we’re also using Stripe for subscription management and product setup. Stripe calls their own functionality in these areas Stripe Billing. This is the primary change between these two versions of Outseta.

Why we chose to rebuild around Stripe Billing 

OK, so we’re using Stripe more… but why? There were two primary reasons behind the decision.

Buying back time so we can innovate more on the rest of the Outseta stack

When we launched Outseta in 2016 a big part of our reason for doing so was that products like Stripe Billing didn’t exist. It was way too hard for companies to start selling subscriptions; especially for those that didn’t have developers comfortable working with Stripe’s APIs. So we set out to make that easier—and we did!

But now many years later, Stripe Billing does exist—and Stripe will always have more resources dedicated purely to payments. Payment processing alone is not what makes Outseta powerful—it’s the tight integration of payments with authentication and protected content, as well as the business tools (CRM, email,  help desk) that we deliver in one package.

While we could continue to maintain our own billing infrastructure, building and maintaining software related to payments is a huge task. By leaning more fully into Stripe, we ensure that our customers always get the latest and greatest payment processing tools—and we’re able to buy back an enormous amount of time that we can reinvest into improving the rest of our software. We think this is more important than ever, as expectations around CRM, email, and help desk tools are shifting significantly for the first time in a long time.

Stripe will handle payments as well as we ever could, so we’re freeing up our team to innovate on the rest of what Outseta offers—which is what differentiates us, anyways.

Moving from rigid SaaS-focused architecture to something much more flexible

The second major reason for the move was a simple one—Outseta v2 was built specifically with SaaS companies in mind. This resulted in an underlying data model where every account has a single subscription plan, and then other products can be purchased by logged in users via add-on products.

This “one plan, many add-ons” architecture worked great for SaaS businesses and many of our customers who sell a relatively limited set of products. But over time, this became a real constraint for customers who wanted to sell a portfolio of products freely, without requiring existing customers to login to their accounts to buy more stuff.

You couldn’t just send someone a link to buy an add-on product—they had to login to their account first in order for the product to be associated with their account. When you’re trying to sell as much stuff as possible, that was often less than ideal.

Outseta v3 solves for this—it’s a much better fit for businesses that want to sell a portfolio of products freely. Any given customer can buy any number of subscriptions or other products, and all of those products get automatically tied back to their account based on their email address. No login required.

Understanding the Differences between Outseta v2 and Outseta v3

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Now that we’ve covered what’s changing and why, let’s get into the technical specifics for those who care.

Payment intents and compatibility with other Stripe products

Outseta v2 has long been reliant on payment intents precisely because “products” were not being set up in Stripe. Instead, products were set up in Outseta and we’d send a payment intent (via an API call) to Stripe saying “Hey, charge Geoff $35 for a Pro subscription.”

This is a less common method of integrating with Stripe. That’s meant that other products in the Stripe ecosystem ranging from affiliate management software to accounting integrations didn’t work with Outseta out-of-the-box. Most complimentary products within the Stripe ecosystem assume that products like Outseta use Stripe Billing under the hood—Outseta v2 was fairly unique in that it didn’t.

With Outseta v3, you’ll see “Subscriptions” in Stripe and far greater compatibility with nearly all of the other software tools within the Stripe ecosystem.

Benefits of checkout on a Stripe hosted page

We know that some of you would prefer that checkout happens entirely on your own domain rather than being redirected to a Stripe hosted checkout page. This is most often a design preference, but there are some important points to consider here that are generally not well known if you haven’t built a same-domain checkout experience on top of Stripe before.

First, while the checkout occurs on a Stripe domain Stripe does allow you to customize the look and feel of this page to match the aesthetic of your brand. Your colors, your fonts, your logo, etc.

Second, Stripe’s checkout pages are heavily optimized for conversions. Because of the volume of payments that have been processed through Stripe’s checkout pages, they’ve been hyper-optimized to help you sell.

Third, and this is the big one—you gain a lot in terms of “everything just working.” Your checkout flows are going to be more robust and battle-tested. A Stripe-hosted checkout page solves lots of little nagging issues that require constant upkeep like:

• You no longer need to add and configure a list of the domains where you want checkout to work within Stripe.
• There’s less complexity in always requesting the information required to calculate and apply tax properly at checkout.
• Many of Stripe’s supported payment methods redirect users away from your domain, then need to redirect them back to your domain to complete payment. This adds additional complexity where many payment methods may not work as reliably as they would on a Stripe-hosted checkout page.
• All of the checkout UI, inputs, and behaviors around moving through checkout also need to be optimized and maintained.

In short, with a Stripe hosted checkout page “everything just works” reliably and well with little additional maintenance or configuration required.

Understanding “Stripe Billing” fees and changes in fee structures

Most people think of “Stripe Fees” as being roughly 2.9% per transaction in the US and something like 1.5% per transaction in Europe. This is generally correct, but is also a broad over-simplication—the effective fees that you pay vary based on a wide range of factors from the payment method being used, to whether tax is being applied, to other Stripe products that are being used behind the scenes when processing the payment.

Most payment processing products you’ll find today use Stripe Billing under the hood—Outseta now does too. Whenever this is the case, Stripe charges an additional .7% per transaction for using Stripe Billing on subscription based payments—that’s the difference in fees that Outseta v3 introduces. This is a change in fees paid to Stripe, rather than Outseta’s fee structure.

It’s worth noting that you’ll pay these fees if you process payments with Stripe directly; and the vast majority of competitive products incur these fees, too. If you see “Subscriptions” in your Stripe account, you’re paying these fees already whether you realize that or not. There are no additional fees on one-time products.

Support for more complex pricing models

Outseta v2 has always been strong in supporting a wide variety of payment models—we built support for subscriptions, one-time fee products, editable quantity products, per user pricing, and free trial periods. But this is another area where Stripe will always just offer more—and you can now use Outseta with any pricing model that Stripe supports.

This is particularly useful to companies that want to use sophisticated usage based pricing schemes and tiering structures. You can configure all of that in Stripe now, then sync those plans with your Outseta account.

Our general product strategy here is simple—for most simple pricing configurations, you’ll set up your products in Outseta as you always have. If you want to configure something with greater complexity than the Outseta UI offers, start in Stripe.

Access to Stripe adds a level of permissions

A final point to consider—while we actively encourage users of Outseta v2 not to login to Stripe to do anything related to payments, with Outseta v3 you’ll now find yourself logging into Stripe more often. This could be to make subscription changes, edit invoices, or generally configure other payment related behaviors.

As a result of this, anyone who is commonly making billing related changes will need access to your Stripe account. This introduces another set of permissions related to payments that many of you have been asking for—if you don’t give someone on your team access to Stripe, they’ll have limited ability to make many types of payment related changes.

You can invite team members to your Stripe account by going to SETTINGS > TEAM AND SECURITY within Stripe. Stripe offers very robust set of user roles—the admin role gives trusted users on your team the ability to make any sort of billing related change necessary, but there are more granular permissions available too.

Who should migrate?

OK—that’s probably more about Stripe and payments than most of you cared to ever read. 

And I’ll reiterate—you don’t need to do anything! 

We will continue to support the version of Outseta (Outseta v2) that you are using today. All existing functionality will be maintained, bugs will be fixed, and your payments will continue processing as-is. Over time you will likely notice that things like our product documentation and in-app onboarding experience become more Outseta v3 centric.

In terms of who should migrate, it really comes down to if you see a compelling reason to migrate in the list of product differences I shared above. I think the most common reasons would be:

1. You want to sell a portfolio of products and have been frustrated by Outseta’s current “one plan, unlimited add-ons” model.
2. You want to offer multi-currency billing.
3. You want more robust support for Stripe’s less common payment methods.
   

The other factor to consider is if you have the time, energy, and capacity to work through the migration. If you want to migrate we’ll work closely with you, but there is work involved. We're currently building tools to make the migration process as easy as possible.

What’s involved in migrating?

We’ve already migrated our own business and several other beta customers to Outseta v3. Migrating is very similar to migrating to any other payment provider, in the sense that we need to import all of your existing subscription data into this new version of Outseta.

The level of complexity involved in this depends a lot on the number of products you offer, the number of plans and add-ons you’ve ever sold, and generally the complexity of your billing set up in Outseta today. 

We’ll be working directly with customers who want to migrate their Outseta accounts to Outseta v3 throughout the remainder of this year. Migrations will be prioritized based on both the billing volume and complexity of the migration. We’ll also be rolling out a self-service migration process later this year.

We understand that payment processing is the foundation of your business, and we’re confident that this change lays the best foundation for our customers going forward.

Whether you switch to Outseta v3 or not, we’re particularly excited about one thing—this is going to allow us to more rapidly improve the rest of Outseta for the better.